The Hundred-Year House (5 page)

Case grinned. “You know what I call those? The barf pictures. It’s the barf series.” He’d been drunk for a while.

“I’m starting a new bunch, though. Unloved dresses. I’m butchering them and doing tessellation around the forms. If you have any old prom dresses or anything . . . And I have to say, I’ve never worked better in my life than I have the past few days. This place must have a magic spring under it.”

Gracie patted her knees and sat forward. “Miriam, we’ve got
the perfect little consulting job for you. There’s a painting I want to rotate out of storage, and Bruce hates it. The signature is unreadable, so we have just no idea. It’s raw, but I think it’s sweet.”

Bruce loped behind the far couch and returned with a gilt frame, the farmhouse and pasture inside all awkward angles and illogical sunlight. Like the product of an art therapy class at a nursing home. Bruce said, “We should be paying for her opinion. She’s an expert, you know.”

“We’ll pay her with old dresses!” Gracie said. “She can take Zilla’s cotillion dress. It’s still up in the closet. Remember the yellow one, with the shoulder pads? Oh, it was ghastly! I told you at the time.”

Something came to a boil inside Zee’s head, some irrational sibling rivalry she’d never had to develop skills for dealing with. She did not need a yellow silk dress from an arcane ritual she’d been forced through at age fifteen, even if Greg Stiefler had kissed her in that same dress on the lawn of the Chippeway Club. “You can’t give away my dress,” she said.

Bruce said, “I thought you were for the redistribution of goods to the proletariat!”

“Where did you get this?” Miriam asked. She rested the frame on her lap, squinting down at the corner, running a finger over the paint. She pulled her curls back.

Gracie said, “I believe it’s left from the colony.
There
you go, Doug! Something from the colony!”

“It
could
be . . .” Miriam said. It obviously pained her to be critical. “This person might have had some natural skill, but no training. The perspective is off.”

Case squinted over her shoulder. “Isn’t that what the modernists did?”

“Well, not like
this
. I’m just saying it’s not likely from the colony.”

Gracie flushed and took the painting off Miriam’s lap. “Oh,
don’t worry, dear. We value your opinion. It’s funny, though. George, Zee’s father, seemed awfully fond of it. And he was an art critic! He must have seen something there. I wouldn’t know one way or the other. Sofia!” Sofia was clearing the sugar and cream. “Can you run to the northwest bedroom, the flowered one, and see if Zilla’s old yellow formal dress is still in the closet?”

“Oh, please don’t—” Miriam started, but she swallowed her words. Sofia was already gone.

10

(The white skin

Of his inner arm

The back of his neck, where

His hairline rubs his collar

His hipbones

I could drag him to me

By the beltloops)

11

T
he house had settled into a peaceful rhythm, everyone happily ignoring everyone else. (Sofia, fortunately for all, hadn’t found the yellow dress that night. She’d come down with dust in her hair and sweat on her upper lip. “I even look in the old things from forty years ago, all the long gowns!” On a certain level, Doug was disappointed. He’d pay for a glimpse of this ugly dress.)

And then, on Saturday, Case had been out for a long run when Doug and Zee heard him scream so loudly from below that they’d both leapt from the table. They found him crumpled in the doorway. He’d simply missed the step into the house, landed terribly, and his Achilles tendon had snapped and “rolled up like a window blind,” according to the medic.

—

Doug was in the kitchen one morning a few days later when Miriam came up, filled a glass with ice and whiskey, and headed downstairs again. Doug followed a minute later (victim to a potent mix of curiosity and procrastination) and found Case with his leg propped on the ottoman in its blue medical boot, the drink half-drained. Miriam sat cross-legged on the floor, and they were watching a black and white movie. Doug knew Miriam had been renting them all summer—
Sunset Boulevard
and
Top Hat
and
The Big Sleep
—but this was the first time he’d seen Case join her.

“Mind if I take a break down here?” Doug said. Case shrugged and Miriam said, “Please do.” He sat on the arm of the couch, across from the Morris chair Case had claimed, the one Doug had come to think of as his own. Doug guessed the chair had been in the coach house all along. A brass bar for adjusting its hinged back; worn, cracked leather. He could picture the beleaguered chauffeur who once sat there to read the paper and dream of sailing to Siam.

Doug said, “What are we watching?”

It was
Bluebeard
, Miriam explained, the 1930 MGM version. “It was a cursed movie,” she said, a few minutes later. Case didn’t seem to mind when she turned the volume down. He was watching his glass, anyway, not the screen. Doug didn’t mind either, as her narrative was more interesting than the film. “Absolutely everyone in it was dead within seven years. That’s Renée Adorée, the French one, and she died of something normal. But the other one, playing her sister, that’s Marie Prevost. She died alone in her apartment, and her dachshund started to eat her.”

“Jesus.”

“And John Gilbert, Bluebeard, he was married to Greta Garbo, but he drank himself to death. And then the German maid, the one giving the dirty looks?” Miriam usually moved her hands when she talked, but right now she kept them wrapped around the remote, as if the actors onscreen were doing the gesturing for her. “That’s Marceline Horn. She died the day after
Bluebeard
wrapped, and they realized it was from poisoned makeup in her dressing room. Someone put arsenic in her lipstick. The sicker she got, the worse she looked, so she put on more and more makeup to cover it up.”

“Seriously?”

“There’s a scene—I’ll show you—in one scene, you can see she’s sick. She was supposed to eat the food, but she couldn’t.”

Case cleared his throat and said, “You done, babe?”

Miriam stood. She took a moment to tighten her body, to compose a smile. She handed Case the remote and went to the sunporch. Case switched to CNN, where the news was about people building survival shelters in Colorado, taking their millennial fears a few steps further than Bruce.

“Look,” Doug said, “I had knee surgery a while back. I know it’s—you feel kind of trapped. I know.”

Case didn’t answer.

12

I
f she hadn’t already decided to take action, two things would have made up Zee’s mind. The first was Sid Cole knocking on her office door. He’d climbed all those stairs just to ask if she’d noticed that Jerry Keaton was calling his seminar “The Gay Canon.”

“You were at that meeting,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

“I’m going to teach a class called ‘Milton the Marginalized.’ How about ‘Chaucer, the Forgotten Poet’?”

Zee knew better than to pick a fight, even on someone else’s behalf. She said, “If it makes you feel better, I think he’s got some Shakespeare sonnets on the syllabus.”

“Haaa!” Cole made a great show of collapsing against her wall. “Shakespeare, that famous queer. The Pansy of Stratford-on-Avon.”

The second thing was that Doug had begun working harder on the monograph. The very day after she told him something might be happening with Cole, she came home to find him still at the computer at five thirty, still in the boxers and undershirt he’d slept in. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. It almost broke her heart, to see him working this hard on something no one really cared about, something no one but Zee was waiting for. (The book wasn’t for the masses, but for the fifteen people in the world who already knew everything about Parfitt, and the hiring committees that would never read it but would care that he’d written it.) She couldn’t bear if his effort were all for nothing.

It was funny how much she’d hated Doug when she met him in grad school. He had that lingering, sideways half smile that so often presaged trouble: Here was a man who’d make you feel like the center of the universe, until, just after you’d become hopelessly attached, you realized he looked this way at all women. Besides which he had questionable taste in both shirts and poetry (Edwin Parfitt was a poet her father had once rightly called “miniscule”), and he’d somehow conned all the professors into believing he was the greatest student ever to walk through the program. She invited him to her February spaghetti party along with everyone else, but she’d been rude enough to him over the past six months that she was shocked when he showed up. He held out a bottle of sake, which he told her he’d brought precisely so she couldn’t serve it with spaghetti. “You have to save it for yourself.”

Much later, as the lingerers helped clean up, his wayward elbow knocked a picture frame off her end table, and although the glass was fine, the frame, made of porcelain, had cracked into quarters. The picture was the one of herself, age five, reading
Green Eggs and Ham
to her father. She didn’t want him to fix it. “I
know
you have superglue,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.” And long after everyone else had gone, he sat on the couch holding pieces together until the glue was set and the thing was whole, if spiderwebbed. “She’s not quite seaworthy,” he said. He put it in the middle of the coffee table, a sort of offering.

It was certainly not his macho insistence on solving her problems that won her over—she did not see herself as a fragile thing that needed fixing—but the fact that he seemed so determined to make her not hate him. It became hard not to root for him. It was another six months before they became romantically involved, but the dots weren’t hard to connect. Was there much distance between rooting for someone and loving him? Was there any difference at all, even now?

13

F
ive weeks in (and a week overdue) Doug was still stuck on the soccer team tryout, so he was going back to chapter two, which he’d saved because it was easiest. This was the plagiarism bit, the part that necessitated the presence of the actual
Friends for Life
books. He’d borrowed several from the library, and he placed pens across the pages of each to hold them open.

The first sentence of chapter two was always something like “It seemed the club had been together forever, thought Candy [or Molly, or Melissa] gazing at the faces of her five friends.” Doug started with, “They had so many memories together, these six friends, and as Melissa looked into their faces, she was transported back to that day when they first formed their club.”

He moved on to his descriptions of each girl. By the time he got to Cece (“She was the crazy one of the group,” the others uniformly read. “She even showed up at school once wearing her brother’s army jacket as a skirt!”) he was punchy and decided he’d venture into new territory. “Crazy old Cece,” he wrote, “had started a business of writing poems on her friends’ hands. She charged ten cents a line and had already made enough for a new pair of earrings!”

And so of course it would happen to be this particular day that Miriam knocked softly behind him. He managed to close the computer window, but not the books. He swiveled, hitting his knee on an open drawer.

“I’m on a quest,” she said. She held out a small, orangish-red piece of glass. “I’m searching for absolutely anything in this color.”

“Let’s look.” He led her quickly into the bedroom. Of course there was nothing orange, and now he was just staring at the unmade bed. Doug knelt to examine the stack of books under his nightstand. He rifled through his own laundry basket, hoping not to be faced with the dilemma of dirty boxers in just the right shade. He moved to Zee’s dresser—as if she’d ever let Miriam use her jewelry—but Miriam was gone. He found her back in the study, in his desk chair.

“I used to love these!” she said. She was holding
Candy Takes the Cake
. “God, these have been around forever!”

Doug sank to the floor, where all he could do was laugh. “Don’t you want to know why I have them?”

“I figured it wasn’t my business. I was looking for orange covers, but I see they’re library books. Is this . . . research for the monograph?”

“Oh, Christ. Yeah. So. The monograph is apparently titled
Melissa Calls the Shots
,” he said. “Number 118. I’ve never done this before. It’s just for the money.”

“I’d
hope
so.”

“You’re the only one who knows. Zee would kill me for not working on Parfitt. There
is
an actual book I’m neglecting. A serious book.”

“You don’t call this serious? Listen: ‘Lauren might have forgotten a lot of math that summer, but one thing she learned was this: She would never take the Terrible Triplets camping again.’ That’s poetry!”

He stood and swiped at the book, but she held it out of reach. “Please don’t say anything.”

“We’ll make a deal. Get me something orange, and promise to let me read your Parfitt thing
and
this thing too. It’s hard to sit on such juicy gossip.”

Doug found her an orange bank-logo pencil and an orange ad page from
The New Yorker
, and he suggested she might scan the storage room downstairs for seventies-vintage upholstery.

He couldn’t concentrate after that. He spent the rest of the morning vacuuming ladybug carcasses from behind the furniture.

14

Z
ee knew Sid Cole would be out to dinner with the provost. And she guessed correctly that he’d fill the time between his late class and the seven o’clock reservation with the office hours he always complained were unnecessary for summer students. He sat snacking and grading and growling at any hapless teenager who dared disturb his peace. Zee stuck her head in to ask if he had any papers she could recycle for him. The man had famously refused the college-issued bin and threw everything from root beer bottles to old issues of
PMLA
into the black can under his desk. He smiled up at her, his mouth full of pretzel.